The funniest part of Dave Chappelle’s new special The Dreamer comes right at the top, and not on purpose.
In high-grain black-and-white, we see footage of the comedian’s pre-show ritual before he headlines the stately Lincoln Theater in Washington DC, his home town. To the quaveringly earnest strains of Daydreaming by Radiohead, he smokes a cigarette in silhouette, as if taking a cue from Dewey Cox to think about his whole life before he goes onstage. If someone wanted to create a tone-perfect parody of the self-serious intros that ageing standups use to announce a late phase of maturity and introspection, it would look a lot like this (and in fact it did, when Joe Mande did just that as an ironic bit to open Joe Mande’s Award-Winning Comedy Special in 2017). Chappelle starts his set with an extended anecdote about meeting Jim Carrey on the set of Man on the Moon, when the actor refused to break character as Andy Kaufman, demanding everyone treat him as the person he was pretending to be. And then comes the punchline: that’s pretty much what trans people act like.
